As medievalists, we currently find ourselves with the difficult task of arguing for the importance of the past as both an archive and an analytical tool for the present and the future of humanity. It is no exaggeration to say that the field is in the midst of a disciplinary crisis. But this crisis is also an opportunity. As Anne Le optimistically remarks, crises can catalyze change and what might emerge is a medieval studies that embraces new critical directions and reaches broader audiences. Nevertheless, to make that future a possibility, we must first decide whether medieval studies should be saved.

I find myself uncomfortably aligned with King Ebain, who strips Silence down in order to discover the truth of their body. In the previous installment, I examined a picture that has been characterized as a simple illustration of the Roman de Silence text [fig. 1]. I searched for visual evidence of its transness and found a rather obscure image that enacted gender ambiguities on the text that would not exist without it. That investigation was fruitful and concluded with the suggestion that we might read this miniature as allegory for the obscurity of all visual representation. But in scrutinizing signifiers of biological difference and understanding transness in relation to disguise, I certainly risk succumbing to a transphobic logic that assumes an equivalence of the naked body and gender identity, as well as trans and non-binary identities as unreal fabrications.[1] As Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt warn powerfully, these are ‘pernicious’ tropes that, on one the hand, often originate with modern critics rather than medieval texts and, on the other, may inflict real harm to living trans and non-binary people today.[2] These are high-stakes interpretative problems.

In the heart of a desert, a small flower-covered field glistens with dew surrounding a solitary tomb. Beneath it rest two bodies forever entwined by a shared destiny. Their story, immortalized as one of the most captivating and celebrated love tales in literature, is that of Layla and Majnun. Originally passed down through oral tradition, it was beautifully written by Jami in the 9th century hegira (15th c. CE). It tells of a love thwarted by rivalries and the authority of Layla’s father. In this tale, love is closely linked to suffering, especially during the separation of the lovers. In the end, Layla, unable to survive Majnun’s death, finds in her own passing an eternal reunion with her beloved.

‘Falconry will break your heart in a hundred ways.’ During my time at a falconry apprentice seminar, the master falconer repeated this mantra through tears as she held the body of a small kestrel to her chest in a futile effort to revive it after it had been attacked by another falconry bird. The tender and fragile bond between falconer and hawk is hard to understand from the outside—it might look like a simple case of human superiority and especially male desire to control the wild. Yet the actual experience of spending so many hours in the company of birds produces men and women whose consciousness is subsumed by that of their avian partners. They see things from the perspective of the bird and bend their own minds and bodies to accommodate this other species.